Steamboat Springs still has plenty of snow but could use another head of steam: after real estate sales topped $1 billion in 2007, the resort town weathered a 56 percent decline.

• Author: Lewis, David
• Position: [WHO OWNS COLORADO]

If what you live for is white and fluffy and falls from the sky like manna, you might like Steamboat Springs.

In an average winter, perhaps 250 inches to 300 inches of snow fall on the Colorado mountains. And you will remember how remarkable last year's snows seemed. Yet we still wish to add that in the winter of 2007-2008 Steamboat had a hair under 500 inches of snow, and more than 100 inches in both December 2008 and January 2009.

This winter "hasn't been a killer winter, but it's not bad. Not like last year but not bad," says Randy Rudasics, small-business counselor at Colorado Mountain College's Bogue Hall Enterprise Center.

Much the same could be said for Steamboat's recession: not a killer.

"Everybody's adjusting to 10 percent to 15 percent lower revenues," Rudasics says. "If you look at our newspaper classifieds, a year ago it was 75 percent help wanted and 25 percent real estate ads; now it is 75 percent real estate ads and 25 percent help-wanted ads," which is great for hiring but maybe not so hot for real estate.

Steamboat is a city happily built on snow, and we mean "happily." Residents can scarcely stop chirping about the stuff, and it is a big reason developers are gambling well more than $1 billion on little Steamboat Springs.

"It is a beautiful-looking Steamboat Springs day," economic consultant Scott Forbes says in a phone interview. "It snowed yesterday morning. It snows late in the evening, then in the morning, and you wake up and it's clear.

"It's a little bit like Camelot" that way, Forbes adds.

Steamboat Springs real estate sold like lots in Camelot for a time. Steamboat has grown because of its new projects and "low price relative to the other luxury resorts--still quite a bit less than Aspen or Vail, or for example Sun Valley, or even Park City to some extent," says David Baldinger Jr., managing broker of Steamboat Village Brokers Ltd.

Baldinger says outsiders must realize the city has annexed little over the years and that development largely "is concentrated within what has been the city limits for 30 years. So that put us into a situation where we didn't have very much inventory at all. Basically in a five-year period we doubled our values, and whether it be an entry-level '70s condo or a brand-new house on a golf course for $8 million, pretty much every price category acted similarly."

Yet today, realty-wise, Camelot is showing some cracks. Construction cranes still loom over the little city, but sales of existing...